32 pages • 1 hour read
LonginusOn the Sublime
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Chapters 30-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapters 30-38 Summary
Diction, or word choice, is another source of greatness in writing. In the next set of chapters, Longinus discusses how to select the most beautiful and apt words. Effective word choice brings the following aesthetic qualities to prose: “grandeur, beauty, mellowness, weight, strength, power, and a certain brightness” (41). “Weighty words” are not to be used on all occasions, however, only where they are truly appropriate.
After a lacuna in the text, Longinus’s first examples of effective diction are vulgarisms: commonplace, coarse, or earthy words and expressions. Their expressive power is sometimes preferable to that of more refined diction because vulgarisms are connected with “our common experience” (41), and “what is familiar is more convincing” (42).
Longinus praises Plato’s use of metaphors for the parts of the body (43). Such metaphors have a “natural loftiness” and bring us “delight.” Metaphors must “appear necessary” and convey emotion, and writers should limit their use of metaphors to two, or at most three, in a single passage.
After another lacuna in the text, Longinus discusses hyperbole, a form of amplification through exaggeration. Comic hyperbole, for instance, exaggerates the small so as to provoke ridicule and laughter. Hyperbole must not be overdone, or its effect will be spoiled. It must arise naturally out of the situation being described, and is often most effective when we do not notice its existence at all.
In addition to his examples of great word choice, Longinus meditates again on the concept of genius. Great genius compensates for occasional errors of style, and truly great writers are “close to the nobility of a divine mind” (48).
Chapters 30-38 Analysis
Though he provides rules for most aspiring writers to follow, Longinus believes that literary genius must be allowed free rein in order to thrive. In Chapter 33, he maintains that a freewheeling genius is preferable to a lesser talent who follows all the rules. Even if great writers sometimes show inconsistency and flaws, they should still “get our vote for their nobility of mind” (45). For Longinus, the guiding ethos and strength of conviction behind a work of literature outweigh the many individual qualities and rules he outlines in the treatise, important as they are. Great geniuses can break the rules and get away with it. They can overlook “precision in every detail” in favor of the bigger picture, and they are entitled to do this because their virtuosity brings them to a “more than human level” (47). For the rest of us, Longinus provides a rulebook.
Longinus expands philosophically on the theme of the sublime in Chapter 35. Nature intended man to be oriented toward the great, that which is “more divine than ourselves” (47). Thus, we naturally marvel at the great and impressive, and are not satisfied with the small and merely adequate.
However, Longinus states that not only greatness, but also the comic and ridiculous, are legitimate subjects for literature. He makes this remark while describing comic hyperbole, which expresses laughter, a “passion which has its roots in pleasure” (51). Though laughter is small and human, not on the same scale as the imposing expanse of the natural world, it is a successful element of writing because it causes an emotional response.
Longinus returns here to the idea that balance must be achieved between natural expression and technical exactness. Grandeur is characteristic of nature, while precision is characteristic of works of art. The Nile River impresses us by its size and breadth, not by neat proportions or excellent taste. Longinus appeals here to the Classical idea that art imitates nature. Art is greatest when it imitates the impressive grandeur we sense in nature. Yet the rules of art have their purpose and importance too. In fact, nature and art complement each other and “together may well produce perfection” (49).
